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EJToday: Top Headlines

EJToday is SEJ's selection of new and outstanding stories on environmental topics in print and on the air, updated every weekday. SEJ also offers a free e-mailed digest of the day's EJToday postings, called SEJ-beat. SEJ members are subscribed automatically, but may opt out here. Non-members may subscribe here. EJToday is also available via RSS feed. Please see Editorial Guidelines for EJToday content.

"Some eight million metric tons of plastic waste makes its way into the world’s oceans each year, and the amount of the debris is likely to increase greatly over the next decade unless nations take strong measures to dispose of their trash responsibly, new research suggests."

"A U.N. deal to fight global warming due in 2015 is set to avoid tough penalties for nations that fail to keep their promises, relying instead on persuasion and peer pressure, delegates at climate talks said on Thursday."

An ecological treasure, a forest maintained by the Kernan Family in upstate New York for seven decades, is now "threatened by the construction of the Constitution Pipeline, a $700 million, 124-mile conduit designed to transport natural gas from the Marcellus Shale fields of northeast Pennsylvania" to pipelines serving markets in New York and New England.

"A federal judge has granted two animal protection groups a unusual preliminary injunction to stop the Bureau of Land Management’s roundup of more than 330 wild horses in northern Nevada, saying the government cannot rely on a five-year-old environmental analysis that ignores claims the herd would be harmed by a pesticide given as a form of birth control."

Mississippi Power, a subsidiary of the Southern Company, is building a so-called "clean coal" plant in Mississippi. The cost has ballooned from the original estimate of $1.8 billion to the current $6.17 billion (and counting). As the residents of rural Kemper County can tell you, that is just the beginning. It will strip mine lignite from 48 square miles of timber and pasture land.

"The U.S. Surgeon General lists 21 deadly diseases that are caused by smoking. Now, a study in this week's New England Journal of Medicine points to more than a dozen other diseases that apparently add to the tobacco death toll."

"Almost 200 nations complicated a drive for a U.N. deal to combat climate change in 2015 on Wednesday by more than doubling the length of a draft negotiating text to about 100 pages of radically varying solutions."

"Hoping to stem illegal wildlife trafficking, the Obama administration on Wednesday introduced an aggressive plan for taking on traffickers that will include using American intelligence agencies to track and target those who benefit from the estimated $20-billion-a-year market."